Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Wednesday

29 Jan 2025

Will Marco Rubio kibosh the Chagos deal?

There’s a new sheriff in town. Trump’s election means a new Secretary of State; the world’s most powerful foreign minister is now a Republican. Out goes Anthony Blinken, Joe Biden’s longtime Francophone aide. In comes Marco Rubio, the three-time Florida Senator. Unlike some of Trump’s cabinet picks – like the unorthodox Pete Hegseth at Defence – Rubio sailed through his Senate confirmation, winning the unanimous approval of his former colleagues. This is partly because the ideological switch from Blinken to Rubio is less dramatic than in other cabinet posts. Both men are staunch supporters of Nato; both received a big thumbs up from national security establishments across the West. Europe

Steerpike

Reeves blasted for backing third Heathrow runway

Growth is the flavour of the month for Sir Keir Starmer’s government, with Rachel Reeves this morning delivering a big speech on Britain’s economic potential. As the Chancellor attempts to woo the public with a number of talking points in today’s address, all eyes remain on the rather controversial matter of Heathrow’s expansion – which, Reeves announced today, is ‘badly needed’. Going on, the Chancellor insisted: We cannot duck the decision any longer. A third runway at Heathrow will unlock growth, boost investment and make the UK more open. This government supports a third runway at Heathrow and is inviting proposals to be brought forward by the summer. Golly. It

Gavin Rice

Why Britain needs growth

‘Growth’ – the focus of the Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ speech this morning – can be a confusing word. It’s intangible, obscure, hard to visualise. It happens slowly, often imperceptibly, over a political cycle – when it happens at all. The changes needed to achieve it can be tough and involve trade-offs. Often voters feel those changes will not directly benefit them, or may even make their lives worse – whether it’s new housing developments, HS2, a new runway at Heathrow (which Reeves backed) or new nuclear power stations. For anyone who stood on the doorstep during the last election, we know that making and doing more things can be a hard

Steerpike

Mandelson grovels to Trump on Fox News

Oh Mandy. It’s now nine days since Donald Trump was elected – and our new man in Washington is still yet to get final sign-off. Peter Mandelson was named as the new UK Ambassador to the US last month in a move that did not go down well with all in Trumpworld. Mandelson has made various insulting comments about the new President, calling him everything from a ‘danger to the world’ to a ‘little short of a white nationalist and racist’. Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita spoke for others when he dubbed Mandelson an ‘absolute moron.’ Ouch…. Now, in a belated effort to suck up to Trump, the Prince of Darkness has prostrated

Ross Clark

Labour will regret extending the BBC licence fee

The BBC licence fee is dying as millions of Britons realise that they do not need a television; they can get all the entertainment and news they want on the internet. But don’t assume that it will go quietly. On the contrary, we could end up with something even worse. Bloomberg is reporting today that the government is considering extending the requirement to buy a TV licence to people who use streaming services. In other words, download a film from Netflix and you would have to pay the BBC. Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, apparently denies that the idea is under ‘active consideration’, along with the idea of funding the

Isabel Hardman

The NHS isn’t solely to blame for its failure to reform

Can the NHS reform itself? MPs on the powerful Public Accounts Committee (PAC) say it doesn’t know how to. It has published a stinging report this morning, accusing both NHS England (NHSE) and the department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) of ‘complacency’ and blaming external factors for the poor financial position of the health service. In return, the NHS has lashed out at what it calls a ‘flawed’ report which contains ‘basic factual inaccuracies’. The select committee report complains that the health service is relying on overly optimistic projections of the improvements to productivity that it can achieve, and that it ‘was unable to convince us that it has a

Gavin Mortimer

Like the Louvre, Macron’s presidency is falling apart

Emmanuel Macron has promised to return the Louvre to its former glory in an ambitious renovation project that is forecast to cost between €700 and €800 million (£586 and £670 million). The French president outlined details of what he called his ‘New Renaissance’ project on Tuesday as he stood in front of the Mona Lisa. As part of the revamp, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece will have its own room and visitors will pay for the privilege of seeing the enigmatic smile. Other initiatives include a second entrance – to ease the current congestion of 30,000 visitors a day – and a new entrance fee from next January that will require

James Hanson

Hollywood luvvies have become Donald Trump’s useful idiots

In events that were foreseeable to anyone outside America’s cultural elite, the actress and popstar Selena Gomez is facing an online backlash to her now-deleted Instagram post decrying Donald Trump’s immigration policy. The offending video featured a sobbing Selena, who has Mexican heritage, wailing into her phone camera that ‘all my people are being attacked’ and that ‘I wish I could do something but I can’t’. It was a performance of such histrionic hamminess it’s little wonder Miss Gomez missed out on an Oscar nod for Emilia Perez. The reaction has been swift and unforgiving. Many were quick to point out that, contrary to Gomez’s assumptions, Trump’s plan to deport unlawful

Matthew Lynn

Why Rachel Reeves’ growth plan is doomed

The wait is over. After six months in government, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has decided that today is the day to step forward and pull the big lever marked ‘growth’. In a widely-trailed speech, she has outlined all the different ways her government is going to get the economy moving again. There is just one snag. The lever isn’t attached to anything. In reality, Reeves doesn’t have a clue where growth comes from – and that means her big speech this morning won’t change anything. Reeves has, at least, finally got round to detailing how she plans to make the UK the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Cynics might wonder why

Patrick O’Flynn

Reform is on the up – but it could easily come unstuck

British politics is in a new place: the combined polling score of Labour and the Conservatives is below 50 per cent for the first time in living memory. The latest polls have Labour averaging 26 per cent and the Tories 23 per cent. This is a nine point reduction on the terrible combined score of 58 per cent that the two traditional main parties obtained on polling day last year – the lowest ever recorded at a general election. The picture becomes even worse for the traditional duopoly if one drills down to public perceptions of them on the main political issues. Looking at YouGov’s regular series of ‘which party

Connor Leahy

DeepSeek shows the stakes for humanity couldn’t be higher

What is DeepSeek, the Chinese AI system that’s shaken the world, and what does it reveal about our future? While DeepSeek has been around since 2023, what shocked the world was the release on 20 January of their DeepSeek-R1 AI model, a Large Language Model (LLM) that is just as intelligent as American giant OpenAI’s latest AI o1, but was far cheaper to create. The increased efficiency comes from the artificial intelligence underlying R1. DeepSeek claims it only cost them a mere $6 million, while US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have spent more than ten times as much to create comparably smart AIs. DeepSeek’s success is due to many

Tuesday

28 Jan 2025

Brendan O’Neill

The ‘dejudification’ of the Holocaust

Imagine talking about the transatlantic slave trade and not saying the word African. Or discussing the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda without saying ‘the Tutsis;. It would be unthinkable, right? Impossible, in fact. How could you talk about such grave crimes without mentioning the victims, without making at least a passing reference to those whose liberty and lives were ravaged in the barbarism? I worry that we are only half-remembering the Holocaust Well, quite a few people managed it yesterday. They talked about the Holocaust without naming its victims. They talked about this ‘sacrifice by fire’ – to give Holocaust its literal translation – without saying who it was that was

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Is it time to take Trump’s Gaza resettlement plan seriously?

As Donald Trump toys with the audacious idea of relocating Gaza’s population – whether to neighbouring Jordan and Egypt, or even as far afield as Albania and Canada – he touches on one of history’s most contentious and emotionally charged issues: the relocation of peoples. Resettling large populations is never easy. History is full of cautionary tales The concept carries the heavy weight of historical precedent, fraught with both tragedy and necessity. Refugees, displaced by war or persecution, have long been subject to the capricious winds of political interest and international indifference. The Jewish people, exiled and scattered for centuries, endured persecution before reclaiming sovereignty in Israel. Refugee crises in

Steerpike

Which MPs have the worst voting record?

They say that sunlight is the best of disinfectants. But MPs haven’t always be so keen on having their voting records online. Some take issue with how their votes are portrayed; others suggest disproportionate weight is given to divisions they do attend. Still, Mr S is always keen to see which Honourable Members are turning up – and which ones look to be checking out. So Steerpike has been taking a look at how many times our elected representatives have voted since the last election in July 2024. In the six months since, there have been 91 divisions. When Sinn Féin and the deputy speakers are excluded, it turns out

Andrew Tettenborn

‘Non-crime hate incidents’ are a threat to free speech

There’s more than meets the eye to today’s story of a leaked Home Office report calling for police to be encouraged to file ever more reports of non-crime hate incidents (NCIHs). The word “report,” suggesting work by scrupulously impartial civil servants, seems a strange description of what looks like a pretty blatantly political document, which at one point castigates suggestions of two-tier policing as a “right-wing extremist narrative.” But while that comment has grabbed most of the headlines, we should not ignore the worrying suggestion that police officers could come under pressure to record more NCHIs. The counter-extremism review suggests there should be a reversal to the Tory government’s move to limit

Sam McPhail

The new Champions League format has been a disaster

Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain could be knocked out of the Champions League tomorrow night. So thank God for the tournament’s new format, or so say the pundits. Yes, there’s the glee that most football fans feel when two of Europe’s petro state-owned superclubs are struggling. But the pundits also see Man City’s scrambling as a vindication of the Champions League’s face-lift. Finally, an end to the ‘bore fest we’ve had for years’, says pundit Jamie Carragher. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype and even easier to forget the great tournaments of the past few seasons. Nevertheless, the suits at UEFA – European football’s governing body –

Ian Acheson

Why do Home Office staff think talk of two-tier policing is ‘extremist’?

How do you create a low-trust society? One way to do so is to have an administrative class which seems to treat the views of ordinary people with contempt. Today’s news of a leaked Home Office report on counter-extremism is a classic of the genre. The report, commissioned by the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, in the wake of the August 2024 riots, says that claims of ‘two-tier policing’ are a ‘right-wing extremist narrative’. This is a rather bold assertion, not least because the widely held and almost certainly correct perception that police obfuscation over the identity of the Southport child murderer Axel Rudakubana was a catalyst for disorder in the summer. Trust in our

James Heale

Labour’s Richard Hermer problem

13 min listen

Richard Hermer was one of the surprise announcements from Keir Starmer’s first Cabinet, and one of the most controversial since. Starmer’s old pal came with some notable baggage: his former clients include Sri Lankan refugees to the Chagos Islands and ex-Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, as well as British-Bangladeshi Isis bride Shamima Begum. In government, Hermer has played a key role in several contentious decisions, such as the government’s withdrawal of the UK’s objections to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and his involvement in the Chagos Islands deal. And today he admitted that he has had to recuse himself ‘from certain matters’ due to potential conflicts

Svitlana Morenets

Why Putin is feeling more confident

At a recent closed-door session in Ukraine’s parliament, Kyrylo Budanov, the country’s spy chief, was asked how much longer Ukraine could hold on. His answer reportedly stunned the room: ‘If there are no serious negotiations by summer, very dangerous processes could begin, threatening Ukraine’s very existence.’ Ukraine’s military intelligence rushed to deny the statement, but his warning rings true. Vladimir Putin has every reason to believe he can still break Ukraine into submission later in the year, and plans to stall any peace settlement in the upcoming talks with Donald Trump. Russian troops are advancing faster than they did in 2022. Last year, they captured more than 1,600 square miles

Rupert Lowe

Rachel Reeves can’t ‘regulate for growth’

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) are under pressure to reduce red tape in the financial sector. “We’ve told our regulators they need to regulate for growth, not just for risk,” the Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said. But the idea that tweaking regulations will somehow unlock growth is a fallacy. The idea that tweaking regulations will somehow unlock growth is a fallacy The problem is that these ungoverned and rogue regulators are manned by second-rate lawyers and special interest groups who present their ideas as mainstream. They have never facilitated growth and have created a labyrinth of rules that suffocate the UK’s financial services industry, serving